Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer has been caught red-handed barring members of her caucus from voting with Republicans
Wisconsin Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer was caught red-handed Friday barring members of her caucus from the Assembly floor so as to prevent them from voting for Republican-authored bills.
Republican Representative Shae Sortwell took to the floor Friday to call out Neubauer’s leadership team after spotting Democrat Representative Joe Sheehan walking from the floor to his office ahead of a vote on Republican bills restoring accountability to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
“I said, ‘Hey, you’re going the wrong way,'” Sortwell recounted. “He laughs and he keeps walking. And then we get to the floor. And they asked for a leave [of absence for Sheehan]. And I thought to myself, ‘Well what the heck is going on?’
“And then I thought about a little bit more. I forgot that these bills were on the calendar for today. And we see that maybe this is more of the same from the other side of the aisle. They don’t want dissent from their side.”
Sortwell noted that Sheehan, the former superintendent of the Sheboygan Area School District, had previously voted with Republicans on the DPI bills and was a strong supporter of them.
By removing him, Neubauer could claim the bills passed with “only Republican support,” denying Republicans the chance to highlight true bipartisanship Sortwell called this practice out on the floor, noting this wasn’t isolated.
He referenced other Democrats who mysteriously vanished for controversial votes, only to reappear later. One, Democrat Steve Doyle claimed that a “migraine” kept him away from the floor until just after bills he would have voted for were passed Thursday evening.
The pattern was confirmed when Republican Rep Nate Gustafson asked Democrat Sylvia Ortiz-Velez she had ever been ordered off the floor to avoid voting with Republicans.
“Yes,” she answered.
In September, Democrats didn’t just keep her from voting; they actually barred her from the Capitol after bizarrely claiming she had threatened to shoot it up. Amid a dispute over her exclusion on a Democrat-authored measure on Hispanic Heritage Month, she used heated language about “bringing a gun to a knife fight,” prompting her brief expulsion.
Her confirmation Friday that Democrat leadership barred her from voting with Republicans provides overhwhelming evidence that Neubauer prevented Sheehan from attending the floor session on which DPI bills were to be considered and that Doyle did not actually have a migraine and was instead kept from voting with Republicans.
Democrat Rep Jill Billings vehemently denied this in her own floor speech Friday and accused Sortwell of hurling wild and unproven allegations, but the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly supports Sortwell’s claims and demands further investigation into whether Democrat leadership is effectively silencing the voice of tens of thousands of Wisconsinites by preventing their representatives from voting on their behalf.
